Holofernus Meiersdorf is a halfling beekeeper who lives in the fantasy land in which the Witcher franchise takes place. Previous reviews of Beekeepers in fantasy worlds have provided us glimpses of some very powerful beekeepers. Sadly, Ol’ Holofernus is not another one like that.

Holofernus, with his sons Bernie, Franklin, and Hugo, runs a honey farm called Honeyfill Meadworks. They seem to do a good job of it, so I’m not going to impugn their skills as apiarists. But what they don’t have is that extra something that makes truly special beekeepers. When they think their farm is under attack by a ghost, what do they do about it? They hire the Witcher to solve their problem for them.

These guys live in a world where magic and stuff is all real, but instead of using magic to become Ultimate Level Beekeepers, they’re just ordinary halfling guys who are actually worried about the threat that ghosts could pose. Power to them for being good at beekeeping, but it’s just a shame that they don’t apply themselves and unleash their full potential.

Two Honeycombs out of Five.

Jurjen

Jurjen fights evil spirits. He’s a plush toy. A mother gave the toy to her daughter and told her it would protect her. The mother, a wizard, did not make this gift and promise idly. She knows full well that evil spirits are real things and that they’d strike at her through her daughter. But the toy, Jurjen, remains vigilant. The thing about evil spirits is that they’re essentially imaginary, they’re more things of mind than matter. The little girl’s imagination is strong and fuel’s Jurjen’s jaunts into the mental realms where the spirits dwell. There, Jurjen fights the evil spirits, to protect a little girl’s life.

I drew this little guy and didn’t quite know what to do with him. The above is pretty vague, but I feel like it is something to work with. I kinda expect to expand on it in the future. The little girl’s mother, the evil spirits. There’s plenty to work with for future posts.

Princess Dazerra

I usually like to put a bit of the character’s story here, but I’m just gonna launch into the background stuff for this one. I like video games where you have to save a princess. It is so simplistic and satisfying. Someone has been kidnapped and needs to be saved. Sure, it doesn’t have to be a princess (Adventure Dennis had to save the Mayor), but there’s something about princesses that just makes it work. Obviously it can be problematic to present princesses as weak and, essentially, objects to motivate the hero, but suppose I want to create a Zelda-style game someday. I need to have a princess there to rescue, right? Correct, but Princess Dazerra is not that princess. Princess Dazerra is the protagonist of the game. She’s on a quest to save her younger sister, who has been kidnapped by the forces of evil. Two princesses, man. This game would rule.

I figure the mechanics of the game would involve finding different gemstones that, when placed in her crown, give Dazerra different abilities to solve puzzles and fight monsters and all that video game hero stuff. I also figure that, man, I suck at drawing swords.

Look, I have made no secret of the fact that I think Beekeepers are underrated. There is really no good reason why the apiarist should not be venerated among the paragons of badassness such as ninjas and pirates and such. To prove that this obsession is not wholly based on my own whims, over the next year or so, I’m going to take you all on a tour of the Beekeepers of fiction and at the end, you’ll all agree with me.

Fist Puncher. I mentioned Fist Puncher way back when I first heard about it. It is the tale of a group of vigilantes who fight their way across the city of San Cruces to rescue some kidnapped beauty queens. One of those vigilantes is a beekeeper, known only as the Beekeeper.

Like all of the Fist Puncher vigilantes, the Beekeeper is a stone-cold badass. In addition to all the standard punching and and jumping and kicking (and a special whirlwind kick thing) of a typical brawler hero, the Beekeeper’s got a swarm of bees to help. With her “Bee.S.P.” (like ESP, but bee-related) she can summon her bees to fly around the level just stinging any enemies that are around. She can also just throw a ball of bees right in an enemy’s face. I played through the game on a Beekeeper-only run and she was able to surmount every obstacle she came across. She rode motorcycles (and ostriches), she fought criminals and robots and Nazis and everything else, she even gained the ability to come back from the dead Twice Per Level. That’s a tough beekeeper.

But here’s the thing, I’m about to give away the end of the game: it turns out that the vigilantes might be acting a little bit rashly. Without going into specifics, it turns out that this cross-town rampage gives the real enemies exactly what they want. This highlights something we’re going to see a lot as I do these reviews: Beekeeper Rage. Beekeepers have anger issues. This is a consistent fact. This particular Beekeeper at least has the excuse that she is going along with her friends in her rampage, but peer-pressure doesn’t make it right. There’s apparently another mode that continues the story, but even if she and her friends get their act together there, the damage has been done.

So, altogether, what do we have? We’ve got a Beekeeper with bees willing to fight and die for her, apparent supernatural powers, and genuine fighting skills. If she could reign in her anger, she’d score higher. As it is, this mysterious Beekeeper’s rating is:

Four Honeycombs out of Five. We’ll soon see that that’s a pretty high score.

All I’ve got this week is the Phone Guys. It’ll have to do.

Meanwhile, I have news unrelated to my comics directly, but connected thematically. I know nothing about the upcoming game Fist Puncher, apart from the fact that it looks like it could be a fun retro-style experience. But once I learned that there was a vigilante beekeeper in it, I had to bring it up. The elevation of beekeepers into badass territory is a long-standing quest of mine. I am glad to see the idea is starting to permeate the cultural subconsciousness.

Okay, so, with the release of the latest Swartzwelder novel, the Million Dollar Policeman, I have declared National Bookorderin’ Day in the Nation of PDR. But this year I have a complication: I already bought my books for this year. I did it months ago.

So, in addition to my new Swartzwelder, I’m getting the Black Panther Masterworks, which collects that characters appearances in Jungle Action. I’ve read these some time ago and they were quite excellent. Even saving a bit for a sale price, I’m paying more than I ought to spend these days, but owning this is going to make me happy, so there’s that to consider as well.

On top of this I got the cheapest of the used copies of the Space Quest Companion, which as far as I can tell is a prose retelling of the Space Quest games narrated by Roger Wilco. I would like to read that.

I will not be buying more books this year. This is all the money I can spend.